IBM supercomputer Blue Gene /P breaks petaflop record

IBM's latest entry in the Blue Gene supercomputer line, the Blue Gene /P, is on track to break the petafloppetaflop record, soundly beating its predecessor's (the Blue Gene /L) record of a sustained 280 teraflops. The recent development of the Blue Gene /P will likely guarantee IBM another year at the head of the Top 500 Supercomputing List. As for the /P itself, the system is scheduled to deploy for the first time later this year at the Department of Energy's Argonne National Labratory. Other deployments to follow include the Max Planck Society and the Forschungszentrum Julich research center (both in Germany), Stony Brook University, Brookhaven National Labs (American), and the Science and Technology Facilities Council in Cheshire, England.

Like its predecessor, the Blue Gene /L, the /P is built around a tightly-integrated system-on-a-chip design that stresses low power consumption, a high number of nodes, and massive parallelism. Where the Blue Gene /L integrated these features around a dual-core PowerPC 440 processor running at 700MHz, the /P relies on a more advanced quad-core design that links four PowerPC 450 processors at 850MHz into a single package.

The one-petaflop version of the Blue Gene /P requires 294,912 processors and takes up 72 racks, while the three petaflop flavor requires 884,736 processors linked across a 216-rack cluster. Like the Blue Gene /L, the /P is capable of electrically isolating a failed node to allow the system to continue operation.

Blue Gene /P is a further refinement of the techniques and design principles originally used to build Blue Gene /L, but it's not the final word from IBM. A further supercomputer, still under development, is the Blue Gene /Q. Although little is known at this point about the /Q, performance from this particular system could reach up to 10 petaflops.

EDIT: Our original post stated that the Blue Gene /P had already broken the 1 petaflop record. After carefully reviewing IBM's statements, it appears the system is projected to break the record, but has not actually done so.